It's been years since the last time gamers had as high expectations of an adventure game as they did of Syberia. Adventure fans hoped a miracle would happen, and a single game would be enough to revive the stagnant adventure gaming niche. Others simply expected graphics and story strong enough to top The Longest Journey. Virtually nobody thought that Syberia would be a disappointment. It is admirable that facing such high expectations, the game delivered the goods. Syberia is easily one of the best PC games to grace store shelves this year.
The story
In Syberia, you play as a young New York lawyer, Kate Walker. You were sent to a remote French village to seal a takeover deal. Your company is supposed to deliver a toy factory to their new owners. However, the owner of the factory died, and a mysterious heir appeared. It is your task to find this heir and convince him to sign the contract.
Over the course of the game, you will travel to several very unique locations. You will be following the very peculiar trail of a genius. You see, the toy factory wasn't your average company. In fact, it didn't really produce toys at all. The factory was producing automatons - a kind of robots, but powered by springs. Highly evolved mechanical devices. In fact, the pinnacle of the production was an android, strongly resembling C3PO from Star Wars, only that you had to turn the key a few times to power him up, instead of plugging in batteries. The mysterious heir, who apparently found great pleasure at creating such toys, designed it. Unfortunately, time has taken its toll on his devices, and most of them have broken down. You will need to fix many of them before being able to leave a location, and move on.
As the game progresses, your character will change as well. She starts out as your average lawyer, but soon will start having doubts about the work, her personal life and even the morality of the task she is supposed to do. This is a very unique feature for a computer game, and I congratulate the designers for including it, and for refining it better than in any other game I have ever seen. However, it is still not fine-tuned enough: you will develop much faster than your character, which somewhat subtracts from the authenticity of the game.
Game mechanics
Syberia is a point-and-click adventure game seen from the third person perspective. As in other games of such type, the cursor changes when you are able to perform an action, otherwise your character will simply move to the location you clicked on. The game sorely misses keyboard shortcuts, but considering the leisure pace at which you will progress, I guess it's not a big loss.
The inventory is your average adventure inventory as well. You will be able to collect items and store them in your inventory. I am glad the designers did not include a feature to rotate your items here; it's quite useless and requires much more system resources. However, you will not be able to combine inventory items. The second part of the inventory screen holds documents you have collected, for future reference. I found them quite useless after I read them once. In addition, there is a recorder that keeps all your conversations, and a cell phone that you will be using from time to time.
Puzzles are one of the main disappointments of the game, however. Combining inventory items is one of the most common ways to design a puzzle in an adventure game, and the inability of the game to do so hurts the quality of puzzles tremendously. As a consequence, you will spend most of the time running from one person to the next and exhausting all topics of conversation, only to unlock another topic with a different person. You will collect and use items from time to time, but I've never has more than a dozen of items at the same time, and knew of even fewer game objects that allowed me to use the items on. The only frustrating puzzles are those where you have to select from several choices to perform an action, but only one selection will produce the desired result. In one such instance, you will have to produce a set of legs. You will have a choice of six materials, and every time you use one, you will have to run through several screens, pick up the legs, run through several more screens to try the legs on and run back to try out another material.
Gameplay - 8
Overall, the gameplay is very good. The story is absorbing, logical and unique enough to keep you interested. I would even argue that the low quality of puzzles helps the game to attract novice adventure gamers, even though it will put off the more experienced ones. However, I was really missing a sense of urgency in the game. There was never a time when I was reluctant to shut the game off and go do something else; the game never sparked enough curiosity in me to keep playing a little longer.
Graphics - 10
To put is shortly, the graphics are the best I have ever seen in a PC game. Not only they look awesome, but the designers managed to keep the hardware requirements ridiculously low, at 300MHz and 64MB RAM. To achieve this, the designers were very courageous. At a time when 3D is all the craze, the designers stuck with 2D; basically the same we all know and love every since King's Quest in 1984, only improved. The backgrounds are beautifully drawn, and the few birds flying around give them authenticity. The characters are well-animated 2D sprites. The resulting effect is something I would never think was possible on the PC: a fully authentic environment, yet distinctly cartoonish and moody.
There are a few side effects as well. For example, your characters will not get stuck in tight corners. Also, there is no need for more than one camera per screen, and since the screens are static, your character will never run out of sight. In addition, the characters lack the blocky qualities of three-dimensional characters, which are apparent even in such complex resource-guzzlers as Morrowind. Finally, the sprites move correctly in their environment. Often, with 3D characters it is the case that your characters move faster than they walk - they slide in mid-steps. In Syberia, however, the characters always walk properly.
Sound - 9
The music in the game is largely kept in the background. The musical score is rather short, but you will barely notice it repeating. It simply adds a little color to the overall atmosphere of the game.
After voiceover abominations like The Watchmaker, I was thrilled to hear the professional and carefully arranged voices in this game. Syberia heavily relies on dialogues, a fact that the designers were aware of, and put every effort to perfect them. However, I do have a small gripe here, which caused me to subtract a point: no matter where the game takes place, everybody seems to be talking with an American accent. I can only wish that an adventure game will pick up where Broken Sword with its lovely accents left off...
Replay - 8
For an adventure game, the replay value is relatively high. I have played the game twice, and will probably play it again sometimes in the future. The graphics, sound and story are simply good enough to repeat the whole experience. However, the replay suffers from one deficiency: the amount of conversation-related puzzles. If you play the game soon after you finished it, you will be clicking through conversations and get a little frustrated with the amount of time it will take to get anything done. Still, expect to play this game more than once.
Technical considerations
While I had no problems with the game on two different computer, installing it on a third computer has forced me to reinstall Windows. Considering the fact that I was able to run Windows in safe mode but only got a black screen when I started in normal mode, I assume that the installation has somehow corrupted my graphic card drivers. I would highly recommend a complete system backup for anybody who uses the ATI Mobility M4 card or a Dell Inspiron 8000 notebook.
A small buying tip
Syberia will appeal to a very large audience. As such, it figures on the top of my list for possible Christmas presents. Due to the fact that the game is non-violent and very politically correct (in fact, I think that the Teen rating is bogus, aimed at increasing sales), I would highly recommend this game for people who want to introduce their children to computer gaming. It is better to take a pro-active approach and show them harmless yet very captivating games than taking a prohibitive approach and not allow any games, in order to avoid exposing the children to violence. Syberia should be on a list of every parent who prefers the former approach.
Overall - 8.8
As somebody who has been playing PC games for over 15 years, I am very hard to please. This is even more true with recent games, which often lack substance. While I buy 20-30 games every year, I end up giving most of them away, trading on the Game Trading Zone or selling them on eBay. Every year, I keep maybe half a dozen of the best games. Syberia is one of those that I will keep. While not perfect, Syberia is one of the best games of the year, and is destined to become a legend in years to come. Grab it while you can, and enjoy.
